The fascinating future of the humble battery charger

That thing you hook up to your battery terminals may as well be from the stone age.

At their worst, battery chargers are cabinet-sized humming nightmares of inevitable electrocution.

It's tough to admire an expensive tin thing on plastic wheels, and tougher still when they don't work that well. Add to that the pleasant Southern California climate of my garage and a smirking disdain for the kind of freezing temperatures that would dictate battery maintenance outside of regular flogging and I had reason enough to ignore the gadgets entirely. That was a mistake.

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Stashed in a place of honor at the back of the garage is my motorcycle. I've had it for a third of my life and battled its infernal battery since its inception. A modern dual-sport machine, it has no kickstarter. Instead, it relies on an anemic and infuriating little battery designed for centralization of mass rather than cranking power. Add in a few longish periods of disuse, and the little SOB is never there when I need it. Even hooked to an old trickle charger that dangles like a vine from the garage door opener, I just can't get the damned thing to live any kind of life.

Fortunately, over the last decade, the battery charger has been getting brighter. The best of the bunch use charge-monitoring systems and multi-mode charging to condition a battery, becoming almost foolproof in the process. The latest designs are sealed and practically submersible—they won't arc, and they're still inexpensive enough to look like a bargain compared to another spent battery. I'm on battery number four for my bike, by the way—not that I'm counting.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fanciest of this new generation of battery chargers hails from Sweden, and it should come as less of a surprise that when I visited the design center in the dead of winter, it was below freezing and deep into battery charger weather.

"We're not talking about jump-starters," said CTEK CEO Jon Lind with a stern Swedish look over a table of these compact silver gadgets. "Jump-starters are something you use if you've failed at managing your battery." His admonishment rings true. Fortunately, there's hope for me and my ever-truculent motorcycle battery yet.

There's a full model range scattered across the table, most are bright silver, but a number of them are splashed with car manufacturer branding and splashy corporate colors. Porsche calls their version the Charge-O-Mat. Ferrari splashes theirs with Rosso Corsa. CTEK is the OE supplier for all the European luxury and sports brands, Lind tells me, and they just snapped up Corvette as well. The company sells a million of these little chargers annually, but for whatever reason they haven't caught on in the US yet.

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They're the opposite of the hulking thing reminiscent of a Star Wars gonk droid that your grandpa used to keep connected to the old fuselage-body Chrysler stashed in his garage. One of them went into my luggage for the trip home.

Chris Cantle

Back in Los Angeles it's impossibly warm. Lind had suggested that overcharging was a key factor in my struggles. My first attempt to light up the Suzuki didn't go well—it struggled, as usual. I dangled the CTEK charger in place of my useless old one and let it do its thing. A series of lights across the charger's front panel indicates different stages of battery upkeep. In the most interesting of those phases, voltage is applied in pulses, like knocking, to erode sulphation on the battery plates. When set to recondition, the CTEK charger boils the thing to destratify and mix the acid.

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So I let the little gadget have its way with my battery overnight. And it worked.

Back in Sweden, in another demonstration, Lind had held up two pieces of plastic and wire. As his hands closed the distance between the two, a gadget in front of him lit up. No physical connection. No clamping. In close proximity, the onboard LED's were blindingly bright. "The future." Lind said.

Wireless charging of everything may sound like sci-fi, but the technology exists right now, and it has the potential to not just change the way we keep our cars and motorcycles running, but the way we use electricity entirely. Here, Eric Giler explains how it all works at a TEDx talk in Portland:

My new charger—a substantially better, more compact, more efficient, and more effective design than the ones I'd used before it—is, by comparison, stone-age tech

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Lind envisions a time when battery chargers are installed without the fiddly plugs and wires at all. Driving into a garage will be all it takes to get a battery up to optimum charge, just as Giler suggested in the video above.

I imagine my motorcycle starting every time I prod at it. I'm intrigued by the potential wireless future, too.

But as I look at my motorcycle with a battery that works for the first time in ages, present-day tech is good enough for me. For now, at least.

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